Handbook of Universal Literature, From the Best and Latest Authorities

by Anne C. Lynch Botta

The comedy of Menander and his contemporaries completed what Euripides had begun on the tragic stage a hundred years before their time. They deprived their characters of that ideal grandeur which had been most conspicuous in the creations of Aeschylus and the earlier poets, and thus tragedy and comedy, which had started from such different beginnings, here met as at the same point. The comedies of Menander may be considered as almost the conclusion of Attic literature; he was the last original poet of Athens; those who arose at a later period were but gleaners after the rich harvest of Greek poetry had been gathered.

6. ORATORY, RHETORIC, AND HISTORY.—We may distinguish three epochs in the history of Attic prose from Pericles to Alexander the Great: first, that of Pericles and Thucydides; second, that of Lysias, Socrates, and Plato; and, third, that of Demosthenes and Aeschines. Public speaking had been common in Greece from the earliest times, but as the works of Athenian orators alone have come down to us, we may conclude that oratory was cultivated in a much higher degree at Athens than elsewhere. No speech of Pericles has been preserved in writing; only a few of his emphatic and nervous expressions were kept in remembrance; but a general impression of the grandeur of his oratory long prevailed among the Greeks, from which we may form a clear conception of his style. The sole object of the oratory of Pericles was to produce conviction; he did not aim to excite any sudden or transient burst of passion by working on the emotions of the heart; nor did he use any of those means employed by the orators of a later age to set in motion the unruly impulses of the multitude. His manner was tranquil, with hardly any change of feature; his garments were undisturbed by any oratorical gesticulations, and his voice was equable and sustained. He never condescended to flatter the people, and his dignity never stooped to merriment. Although there was more of reasoning than imagination in his speeches, he gave a vivid and impressive coloring to his language by the use of striking metaphors and comparisons, as when, at the funeral of a number of young persons who had fallen in battle, he used the beautiful figure, that "the year had lost its spring."

The cultivation of the art of oratory among the Athenians was due to a combination of the natural eloquence displayed by the Athenian statesmen, and especially by Pericles, with the rhetorical studies of the sophists, who exercised a greater influence on the culture of the Greek mind than any other class of men, the poets excepted. The sophists, as their name indicates, were persons who made knowledge their profession, and undertook to impart it to every one who was willing to place himself under their guidance; they were reproached with being the first to sell knowledge for money, for they not only demanded pay from those who came to hear their lectures, but they undertook, for a certain sum, to give young men a complete sophistical education. Pupils flocked to them in crowds, and they acquired such riches as neither art nor science had ever before earned among the Greeks. If we consider their doctrines philosophically, they amounted to a denial or renunciation of all true science. They were able to speak with equal plausibility for and against the same position; not in order to discover the truth, but to show the nothingness of truth. In the improvement of written composition, however, a high value must be set on their services. They made language the object of their study; they aimed at correctness and beauty of style, and they laid the foundation for the polished diction of Plato and Demosthenes. They taught that the sole aim of the orator is to turn the minds of his hearers into such a train as may best suit his own interest; that, consequently, rhetoric is the agent of persuasion, the art of all arts, because the rhetorician is able to speak well and convincingly on every subject, though he may have no accurate knowledge respecting it.

The Peloponnesian war, which terminated in the downfall of Athens, was succeeded by a period of exhaustion and repose. The fine arts were checked in their progress, and poetry degenerated into empty bombast. Yet at this very time prose literature began a new career, which led to its fairest development.

Lysias and Isocrates gave an entirely new form to oratory by the happy alterations which they in different ways introduced into the old prose style. Lysias (fl. 359 B.C.), in the fiftieth year of his age, began to follow the trade of writing speeches for such private individuals as could not trust their own skill in addressing a court; for this object, a plain, unartificial style was best suited, because citizens who called in the aid of the speech-writer had no knowledge of rhetoric, and thus Lysias was obliged to originate a style, which became more and more confirmed by habit. The consequence was, that for his contemporaries and for all ages he stands forth as the first and in many respects the perfect pattern of a plain style. The narrative part of the speech, for which he was particularly famous, is always natural, interesting, and lively, and often relieved by mimic touches which give it a wonderful air of reality. The proofs and confutations are distinguished by a clearness of reasoning and a boldness of argument which leave no room for doubt; in a word, the speeches are just what they ought to be in order to obtain a favorable decision, an object in which, it seems, he often succeeded. Of his many orations, thirty-five have come down to us.

Isocrates (fl. 338 B.C.) established a school for political oratory, which became the first and most flourishing in Greece. His orations were mostly destined for this school. Though neither a great statesman nor philosopher in himself, Isocrates constitutes an epoch as a rhetorician or artist of language. His influence extended far beyond the limits of his own school, and without his reconstruction of the style of Attic oratory we could have had no Demosthenes and no Cicero; through these, the school of Isocrates has extended its influence even to the oratory of our own day.

The verdict of his contemporaries, ratified by posterity, has pronounced Demosthenes (380-322 B.C.) the greatest orator that has ever lived, yet he had no natural advantages for oratory. A feeble frame and a weak voice, a shy and awkward manner, the ungraceful gesticulations of one whose limbs had never been duly exercised, and a defective articulation, would have deterred most men from even attempting to address an Athenian assembly; but the ambition and perseverance of Demosthenes enabled him to triumph over every disadvantage. He improved his bodily powers by running, his voice by speaking aloud as he walked up hill, or declaimed against the roar of the sea; he practiced graceful delivery before a looking-glass, and controlled his unruly articulation by speaking with pebbles in his mouth. His want of fluency he remedied by diligent composition, and by copying and committing to memory the works of the best authors. By these means he came forth as the acknowledged leader of the assembly, and, even by the confession of his deadliest enemies, the first orator of Greece. His harangues to the people, and his speeches on public and private causes, which have been preserved, form a collection of sixty-one orations. The most important efforts of Demosthenes, however, were the series of public speeches referring to Philip of Macedon, and known as the twelve Philippics, a name which has become a general designation for spirited invectives. The main characteristic of his eloquence consisted in the use of the common language of his age and country. He took great pains in the choice and arrangement of his words, and aimed at the utmost conciseness, making epithets, even common adjectives, do the work of a whole sentence, and thus, by his perfect delivery and action, a sentence composed of ordinary terms sometimes smote with the weight of a sledge- hammer. In his orations there is not any long or close train of reasoning, still less any profound observations or remote and ingenious allusions, but a constant succession of remarks, bearing immediately on the matter in hand, perfectly plain, and as readily admitted as easily understood. These are intermingled with the most striking appeals either to feelings which all were conscious of, and deeply agitated by, though ashamed to own, or to sentiments which every man was panting to utter and delighted to hear thundered forth,—bursts of oratory, which either overwhelmed or relieved the audience. Such characteristics constituted the principal glory of the great orator.

The most eminent of the contemporaries of Demosthenes were Isaeus (420-348 B.C.), an artificial and elaborate orator; Lycurgus (393-328 B.C.), a celebrated civil reformer of Athens; Hypereides, contemporary of Lycurgus; and, above all, Aeschines (389-314 B.C.), the great rival of Demosthenes, of whose numerous speeches only three have been preserved. At a later period we find two schools of rhetoric, the Attic, founded by Aeschines, and the Asiatic, established by Hegesias of Magnesia. The former proposed as models of oratory the great Athenian orators, the latter depended on artificial manners, and produced speeches distinguished rather by rhetorical ornaments and a rapid flow of diction than by weight and force of style.

In the historical department, Thucydides (471-391 B.C.) began an entirely new class of historical writing. While Herodotus aimed at giving a vivid picture of all that fell under the cognizance of the senses, and endeavored to represent a superior power ruling over the destinies of princes and people, the attention of Thucydides was directed to human action, as it is developed from the character and situation of the individual. His history, from its unity of action, may be considered as a historical drama, the subject being the Athenian domination over Greece, and the parties the belligerent republics. Clearness in the narrative, harmony and consistency of the details with the general history, are the characteristics of his work; and in his style he combines the concise and pregnant oratory of Pericles with the vigorous but artificial style of the rhetoricians. Demosthenes was so diligent a student of Thucydides that he copied out his history eight times.

Xenophon (445-391 B.C.) may also be classed among the great historians, his name being most favorably known from the "Anabasis," in which he describes the retreat of the ten thousand Greek mercenaries in the service of Cyrus, the Persian king, among whom he himself played a prominent part. The minuteness of detail, the picturesque simplicity of the style, and the air of reality which pervades it, have made it a favorite with every age. In his memorials of Socrates, he records the conversations of a man whom he had admired and listened to, but whom he did not understand. In the language of Xenophon we find the first approximation to the common dialect, which became afterwards the universal language of Greece. He wrote several other works, in which, however, no development of one great and pervading idea can be found; but in all of them there is a singular clearness and beauty of description.